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as promised, netscape’s social news site propelling forward

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a few days ago i expressed my frustration with the blogopshere for intentionally misinterpreting netscape’s re-branding as social suicide and today i want to tell all the detractors to chew on their hats. tom drapeau, director of netscape, clearly pointed out that the netscape social news site wasn’t being killed, rather that it was just being moved to a new location where it would be relaunched under a new brand and with additional features, but no one would believe it.

drapeau claims that the social news service will go on at a new site, but failed to name the site or when it would be launched; certainly not a good sign for the current netscape editorial team.

well he has delivered on the first of many promises by announcing where the new site would be (http://propeller.com) and the branding of the new site.

my first thoughts on the brand name and the logo are both great. here’s what ‘propeller’ means to me. by definition, to propel means to motivate, actuate, move, prompt, incite, impel, or to give incentive for action and cause to move forward with force. that said, what will we (at propeller, previously netscape social news) be propelling?

on a very basic level the name symbolizes socially driven news. interacting with content by submitting, voting, commenting, and sharing interesting, entertaining, and otherwise important news items. but more than that it symbolizes what netscape plans to do going forward, i.e. propel the social news model into the next generation through a mix of fixing the problems with the current generation and innovation.

so there you have it. the first step in the unveiling of the new home of netscape’s social news site.

I’m all for this as long as the new scouts (or will they be seamen?) and navigators will have the editorial power to remove spam from the front page. As arbitrary as the digg bury system is in burying good content that users disagree with at least it keeps the spam off the front page.